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This week I found myself needing to append a static menu item to the end of a wp_nav_menu()-powered navigation menu. After a bit of Googling, I discovered I could do this using wp_nav_menu()‘s items_wrap parameter.

It’s actually pretty simple. Create a function that picks apart the default value of items_wrap and rebuilds it with a static link. Then call that function in the items_wrap parameter of wp_nav_menu():

This essay was written in early 2013 to be my contribution to Tim Smith’s Lustra Magazine. Unfortunately, circumstances dictated that the project never launched and this has been sitting in my Documents folder ever since. I ran across it today and wanted to share. Enjoy.

We’re lucky folks. By our industry’s very nature, the toolsets available to us are very good because we’re good at building them. That’s a luxury not afforded to carpenters or bakers. A carpenter can’t make a better table saw out of a 2×4 and a baker can’t make a better oven with flour and water. But we’re different. The things we build are made with other things we build.

It’s like a tweet I saw several days ago. Sadly, I can’t find it, but it went something like this.

Kid: “Was the thing you use to program made with programming?”
Dad: “Yes, it actually was.”
Kid: [mind = blown]

When you get down to it, this is huge. It’s no problem if you want a JavaScript component to work substantially different than it currently does — fork that sucker on GitHub and get to it! Want to make significant tweaks to your text editor? TextMate, arguably the best text editor of all time, is just waiting for you. Notice a bug or inefficiency in Ruby on Rails? Fix it and you too could have code in the Rails source.

The sky is the limit it and it’s awesome.

So, a couple of things. First, if we want something, we’ll build it. Second, there are a lot of us and we build a lot of things.

Blessings tend to come hand-in-hand with curses in my experience. Buy a Corvette and you can expect a substantial increase in your car insurance bill. Buy a new MacBook and you’ll be constantly worried it’ll get dented.

Have an endless supply of tools and you’ll never make anything.

I’ve just finished Execute by Josh Long and Drew Wilson. All in all a fantastic book. I wouldn’t say I agree with every single thing in it, but that’s for another time.

What it did best was explaining inspiration — how it works and how to manage it to your advantage. Inspiration is our most valuable asset when building things. With it at our backs, we can do a task twice as fast as it would take an uninspired us to do half as well.

Different people draw inspiration differently. Managing it is the trick. As Drew says in the book, whenever he gets a little tired of building out the backend of an app, he designs a marketing page or tweaks an interface. Design recharges him and gives him fresh energy towards the project.

Making, whether it be designing, developing or even gardening or sewing, is what inspires us. It’s what we as humans were designed to do. It’s our God-given nature and there’s not a thing we can do about it.

Actually, I take that back. It matters a darned lot. It matters that you don’t get stuck there. It matters that you build instead of plan.

Pick something. Build something with it. Only then will you really know if you like it or not. If you get to the end of the project and want to try something different next time, do it. At least you’ll have some real experience to inform your decisions.

Stay inspired. Keep moving. Work hard. Leave things better than you found them. Make stuff.

Since I’ve been in the game, front-end devs have been wrestling with sticky footers like it was going out of style. I’m no exception, but today I learned a trick that made things a lot easier.

Before we go on though, I’d like to explain the problem briefly. It’s common for websites to have a header, a content section and a footer. On pages with a lot of content, the content takes up enough vertical space to push the footer to the bottom of the browser window. But, on pages with little content, sometimes the content does not take up enough vertical space to push the footer to the bottom of the window. This leaves the footer sitting oddly in the middle of the screen.

There are several solutions, each with their own pros and cons.

The Old Way

The old way works well, except that it relies on the footer to be a fixed height at all times. In responsive sites, this is rarely the case. Of course, you could write JavaScript that detects the footer height and adjusts the CSS accordingly, but that’s neither clean nor performant. A CSS-only solution would be better.

The display: table Trick

The only real caveat to this solution that I’ve encountered so far is the styling limitations present with elements using display: table-row. Often padding, margin, etc. don’t behave as expected. This is easy enough to work around by adding a <div> or something inside the .page-row and styling that:

The ACF image field allows you to return either the URL of the full-sized image, the image (attachment) ID, or the image object. How you configure this will depend on the method you intend to use to retrieve the URL.

Using wp_get_attachment_image_src

For this method, you’ll want to return the image ID. To get the image URL, we’ll use the following code:

While I was migrating my blog, I ran across the need to convert my HTML-formatted posts to Markdown. Surprisingly, there are few good tools to do this quickly, but the best I found was to-markdown.js by Dom Christie.

The only weird thing about his app is for some reason he seems to have copying disabled in the Markdown output box. It looks like Dom has reworked the app a bit and this has been fixed.